Meeting of the Parliament 23 April 2015
I add my thanks to everyone who has contributed to getting the bill to this stage and who has provided us with excellent evidence and briefings. Like Clare Adamson, I am new to the committee—I joined in January—so I missed some of the evidence that was received.
As Alex Rowley said, Scottish Labour will support the bill at stage 1 but, as he also pointed out, the bill is so wide ranging that it might have been more effective to have several smaller bills rather than tagging everything together.
I intend to focus on section 68 of the bill, which I believe needs to be strengthened considerably. In his briefing for today’s debate, Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People, Tam Baillie, has drawn our attention to the fact that the bill as drafted would allow children under the age of 18 to work in sexual entertainment venues, as long as there is no actual entertainment taking place at the time. Zero Tolerance has expressed serious concerns about the provision and has warned that it could create a groomers charter, allowing venues to employ teenage girls to work as cleaners, for example, and to then persuade them to become dancers when they reach 18. It also highlights the fact that many of those venues screen pornography in the background, which gives rise to concerns about child protection.
During stage 1 evidence, the Cabinet Secretary for Justice advised that those issues could not be addressed within the scope of the bill, but Zero Tolerance and the Commissioner for Children and Young People disagree. I share the view that no child under the age of 18 should be allowed to work in or attend a sexual entertainment venue in any capacity. I hope that the Scottish Government will look again at this area to see how we can protect young people more.
In respect of the proposed regime, although there is no doubt that sticking to the status quo simply is not an option, and Scottish Labour supports change in principle, we need to consider carefully whether the bill could have unintended consequences. There is a real risk that, in licensing these venues, the Scottish Government could end up normalising a harmful form of sexual exploitation. As Zero Tolerance pointed out in its briefing note for today’s debate,
“if we are to move beyond women’s value and worth being located in their bodies and their perceived sexual attractiveness, we need to move beyond seeing sexual entertainment venues as normal and harmless.”
That view is echoed by the Commissioner for Children and Young People, who has said that the idea that children could be working in these venues and exposed to degrading images of women simply does not sit well with the Scottish Government’s strategy, equally safe, to end violence against women and girls. The strategy rightly places at its heart recognition of the links between discrimination, objectification and violence against women. It aspires to
“create a strong and flourishing Scotland where all individuals are equally safe and respected”.
However, normalising such venues risks sending out the wrong message to young people and especially to young girls. We only need to look at the customer reviews of the venues to get a real flavour of the lack of respect that the clientele have for the women who work there.
There is a risk that, by regulating the sector, we could end up expanding an industry that is harmful to women and is especially harmful to our children, undermining all the work that has been done to address unequal power relationships, tackle gender stereotypes and achieve true gender equality. I hope, therefore, that the Government will be favourable to the section being amended at stage 2.
Sticking to the theme of protecting children and young people from harmful sexual images, another area in which I believe that the bill could go much further is in the restriction of the display of harmful sexualised content in areas where children could see it, such as on supermarket shelves. I would like to highlight the fantastic girl guides campaign, girls matter, which is aimed at ensuring that the issues that matter to girls are addressed in the 2015 general election campaign. Although in recent months we have spent many an hour arguing about full fiscal autonomy and about which of us is the most anti austerity, the girls matter campaign calls for politicians to take action on the issues that really matter to children and young girls. One of the key issues on which it asks politicians of all parties to take action is children’s exposure to harmful sexualised content in the media.